The Right Data Culture is a Predictor of Data Governance Success
Getting business and leadership support for data governance programs – and building a data culture on that buy-in – remains a significant challenge in many organizations. Yet, having this support is a crucial success factor for these initiatives, according to a new survey.
The results of the new survey were presented at a Collibra event in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 2018 by Timm Grosser, head of consulting – BI and data management at BARC, a Teknowlogy Group company. The survey results have also been publishedin a new report.
With 3,045 survey responses, the findings revealed that having the right data culture is a key component to a functional data governance program. Below is a tutorial on how to overcome the challenges of building a data culture to set your business up for success.
It’s clear from the survey that companies continue to experience significant data challenges – often because their existing data culture needs improvement. Nearly half of survey respondents said their organizations suffered from inadequate data quality today, and more than one-third said this would be an ongoing problem in the future. These companies often have to put in quite a lot of manual effort to keep data at a level of quality the business can work with. This costs money and diverts human resources from other, more value-adding work. It also increases risk – sometimes poor data quality can even be responsible for the failure of revenue-generating projects undertaken by the business. Companies clearly need to have a common understanding of data quality standards across the organizational structure.
More than four out of ten respondents indicated that their organization was ineffective at managing its data. Often data governance is not viewed as a strategic essential by the board and senior management, so there is no structured responsibility for data that reaches across the company. Each business team may have its own approach to managing data, with no individual specifically assigned with responsibility for data quality within the team and collaborating with others across the business who use that data.
Another common issue is a lack of knowledge about existing data or an inability to find relevant data – more than one-third of respondents cited these related issues. Often this happens when data governance is a project that only IT engages in. The business is left wondering where the data is, how to find their data, and who has responsibility for it.
